Purple postcards and sewing with kids

Did a little sewing this morning - enough to finish off the purple postcard series, except for the sewing the backing down - the one on the right has that done, but not the others. Still, that's a matter of moments, I can finish it quickly tomorrow or some other time.

The reason for doing little sewing is that I was helping Sarah to finish piecing her log cabin blocks - the blocks themselves are all done now - she has done every bit of the sewing and almost all the ironing. I did the rotary cutting and some of the unpicking, where necessary. There are some small imperfections, but frankly, I have been in blockswaps where some of the blocks weren't made any better than these. Now the task is to sew them together, of course - we will begin that later in the week, probably. She wants to enter the quilt into Sandown (National Quilt Show), which is in June, so we need to get it together and then quilted (just going to stitch in the ditch, nothing fancy).

Of course, Alex wanted to do some sewing as well, so I cut some squares from his collection of panda fabric and let him push the pedal while I did the rest - he's happy, as he considers that "sewing". He's too little to reach the pedal on his own, of course, but frankly, at four he's too young to use the machine, regardless. If he wants to sew next year, I will teach him to handsew. Neither of the girls used the machine until they were at least 6.

For the moment, this panda piece is just a top, which his toy panda is using as a blanket (you've probably guessed this - he's very into pandas at the moment). It's not very big - the central 9-patches started as 4 inch squares, and I cut the top and bottom border at 8 inches, so the whole thing is about 18 inches wide and 24 long, I guess. Plenty big enough for a blanket for a stuffed panda.